BEN PILE
This week, Ed Miliband launched the Government’s new Clean Power Action Plan. But despite claiming that the plan would unleash “£40 billion per year” of private investment, his hyperactive and arrogant performances on social and news media also came this week with more bad news for the rest of us, bad news which his plan has completely ignored. This intransigence – the characteristic of all those claiming to be “climate champions” – combined with the very clear messages from physical and economic reality, amounts to a perfect storm. If the weather doesn’t kill us, Ed Miliband will.
The week began with the tail end of Storm Darragh, showing us yet again that the weather is neither our friend nor can be tamed, regardless of whether global warming is influencing it or not. In the aftermath, millions were left without power after high winds pulled down transmission lines. But most symbolic of all, the bad weather (for that is all it was) destroyed a new 50MW solar farm in Anglesey, North Wales. Yet Miliband’s plan involves more solar panels and more pylons to ferry expensive, weather-dependent and weather-sensitive power around the country. It was a bad time for the Minister with the “Energy Security” brief. Not that reality bothers Miliband all that much.
On the heels of Darragh came the calm after the storm. Most of the continent, in fact, sat under a dunkelflaute – a windless high pressure system. From Wales to Poland, wind turbines sat motionless. Prices on electricity markets, however, sky-rocketed. According to market data website, Epexspot.com, prices for electricity in über-green Germany on Thursday topped €936 per MWh. Thanks to the country’s aggressive Energiewende, which has included a phase out of the nuclear fleet since the Fukushima accident, Germany is wholly dependent on other countries for imports when the weather brings no solar or wind power. And this demand pushes prices up in those countries on which German consumers depend.
Far from symbolising European unity, the Green New Deal looks like it may in fact be driving countries apart. The reality besetting the dream of a continent of interconnectors integrating markets and people was exposed on that same Thursday, when it was revealed by the FT that “Norway’s two governing parties want to scrap an electricity interconnector to Denmark” and that they wanted “a renegotiation of power links to the U.K. and Germany, as sky-high prices trigger panic in the rich Nordic country”. Despite being awash with oil, Norway boasts green credentials which are in fact largely owed to it being a vast land area with favourable geography (enabling hydropower), with a very small population. When the interconnectors glow red hot, Norwegian businesses and households are left wondering why they are paying the price for European neighbours’ lack of foresight.
Prices everywhere were reaching and in some cases topping the prices seen during the peak of the power crisis in the wake of lockdowns in 2022 – a crisis which Miliband et al. continue to blame, not on the green agenda and those lockdowns, but on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Things were no better in the U.K. On December 11th, day-ahead prices had reached £500 per MWh. “We have to face the fact that most of the political establishment are crazy cult members,” argued Net Zero Watch’s Andrew Montford. He is right.
This chaos was coincident with the revelation that the Vestas wind turbine assembly factory on the Isle of Wight is to halve its workforce and shed 300 jobs. Vestas’ plan was simply to shut the factory after demand for its product has fallen. But the Government has stepped in, according to the Telegraph, which explains: “Neither Vestas nor the Government was willing to disclose the financial details of the deal.” And why should they – what they do with your money is none of your business. They’re saving the planet, after all. So shut up.
All of this madness was capped on Friday when the Government’s new policy agenda was unveiled. The Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, with the somewhat unfortunate acronym CPAP, is indeed lame, missing a leg, and too crap even to spell ‘crap’. CPAP promises to tackle “three of the biggest challenges we face today”, two of which are “to maintain a secure and affordable energy supply in an increasingly unstable world”, and “to create new industries and investments around the country”. Almost as if on cue, the news carried bleak economic data: “U.K. Economy’s Contraction Casts Doubt on Labour’s Growth Vow,” explained Bloomberg. “Economy has posted no growth since Labour took office in July,” it continued. “Britain’s economy contracted for a second straight month.” Worse still, the normally green Sky News’s Ed Conway explained that high energy prices were destroying the U.K.’s industrial sectors, especially chemical manufacturing.
Ed Miliband was buoyant, however, as is only possible for someone still drunk on his return to power. Appearing in a social media video clip with his sidekick and former CEO of the Climate Change Committee, now Chair of Clean Power Mission Control, Chris Stark, the Secretary of State yet again promised that CPAP will deliver lower bills, jobs and energy security. Andrew Montford, meanwhile, pointed out that the £40 billion CPAP requires from “private investment” would have to be returned to investors somehow, and that this burden is equivalent to £300 per household. But Miliband’s style of Government-by-TikTok has no time for basic arithmetic. And the point is underscored by Stark’s own incautious, and unwittingly candid boast that: “We’ve produced this at lightning pace – it’s packed with new steps towards clean power.”
Want to know about our Clean Power 2030 Action Plan?
Watch me and @StarkClimate try (and fail) to play⏱️Just A Minute.
This is the biggest set of reforms to the energy system in generations.
A new era of clean electricity. pic.twitter.com/yCk6bigrMQ
— Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) December 13, 2024
And there you have it: a rushed policy agenda that clashes with the reality emerging throughout Europe and the U.K., in complete defiance of the facts and utterly indifferent to the experience of the country’s industries, businesses and households. Ideology put far before the practical needs of nearly 70 million people. Green policy being churned out as if it were going out of fashion, which it is. Indeed, it’s hard to resist the conclusion that Miliband and the Government, sensing that they have only one electoral term to remake society in their own image, are doing as much as they can to destroy the economic foundations they claim to be restoring, and as fast as possible, to make the inevitable backlash as difficult and painful as possible.
I have to admit, there is so much climate news at the moment I find it hard to keep up. And it’s all going in one direction: the Net Zero agenda is all but a corpse. The only thing that is keeping it twitching is the tireless work of Miliband and his army of wonks and Blobbish quangocrats, like so many clinicians in a TV drama set in an accident and emergency ward, desperately injecting, thumping, shocking the patient back to life. But the agenda has suffered a head trauma from the manifest failures of the global COP climate meetings. It has heart failure – the costs of climate policy are now routinely discussed in most mainstream media, from which climate sceptics were barred less than even half a decade ago. And it is immunocompromised – everyone knows that the Government, in all its utterances, is simply lying and incompetent. Even BBC Radio 4’s Today programme saw Ed Miliband challenged on rising energy prices, given he promised they’d fall. This ‘treatment’, involving countless more billions of pounds pumped into a cadaver, is for nought.
Worse still, however, is that although Net Zero is dead, its corpse is still infectious. To sustain it, Miliband believes that £40 billion a year is going to be pumped into the green energy sector. The good news is that we only have to wait a year to see the Government fail to find the so-called “investment”. The bad news is that if it does arrive, it will not be “investment” as ordinary people would understand the term. “Investment” typically means putting money into a thing that yields a greater return than the original sum. But renewable energy is only an “investment” that is attractive to “investors” because of the subsidies that guarantee profits. The risk to “investors” has been eliminated, and thereby governments since 2000 have locked in high and rising energy prices. The Government does not even understand the difference between investing and rent-seeking.
The news this week is not one of a ‘perfect storm’ of unpredictable forces aligning to produce catastrophic consequences – an actual storm preceding a sterile calm, leaving homes disconnected from power and then facing record high prices. The perfect storm is in fact the entirely predictable outcome of allowing ideological zombies bearing only false promises to set energy policy. And rather than facing the facts, Ed Miliband has this week tripled-down on what everyone else can now see are terrible mistakes more than two decades in the making. Wrap up warm: the longer the Government and Miliband remain in office, it’s going to get colder, more expensive and more dangerous.
This article (Ed Miliband Triples Down on Energy Suicide) was created and published by Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Ben Pile
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